People

Team members are staff, students and long-term visitors (3 months or more) of the group.

Current team members

Sebastian Funk

Seb’s main interest is in using computational models in combination with infectious disease data in order to better understand and predict infectious disease dynamics. This includes developing and evaluating methods for short-term forecasting, testing the predictive value of additional data sources on pathogen biology and human behaviour, and doing all of this in order to inform public health decision making. He strongly believes that science should done openly and that there is great value in developing methods as tools that can be used by others.

Alex Richings

Alex is a PhD student whose work focuses on using serological and climatic data to address susceptibility of small islands to vector-borne disease outbreaks. He is interested in developing statistical forecasts with the aim of applying this work to island settings to support the development of early warning systems.

Charlotte Holt

Charlotte is an MPhil/PhD student exploring how machine learning can be used to discover the behavioural response to an epidemic. She is currently exploring the use of universal differential equations and symblic regression.

Emil Iftekhar

Emil Iftekhar is a guest at EpiForecasts and a researcher and epi-modeller at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI, German national public health institute) and the World Health Organization Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. He works on evaluating the process from epi-modelling to decisions and policies. He has a background in physics.

Joshua Lambert

Josh is a Research Fellow evaluating how targeted individual-level interventions (e.g., contact tracing) can be effectively deployed to control emerging outbreak scenarios. He is also keen to develop open-source modelling and data analysis tooling that can be used by the epidemiology research community.

Kaitlyn Johnson

Kaitlyn’s work focuses on developing methods and tools for nowcasting, forecasting, and real-time analysis of infectious diseases using mathematical and statistical modeling. She previously developed methods for incorporating wastewater surveillance data into models to forecast COVID-19 hospital admissions at the U.S. CDC.

Katharine Sherratt

Kath is a research fellow at LSHTM and spends most of her time working on the European Hubs for Forecasting and Scenario modelling of COVID-19. Her background is in epidemiology and she has a strong interest in collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to public health research.

Liza Hadley

Liza is a postdoc exploring the role of infectious disease modelling in outbreak response. She is interested in how mathematical modelling is used by governments, health organisations and other decision-makers during a health crisis, and whether the process can be improved. Our recent study interviewed modellers and policy and decision-makers in 13 countries that used modelling for Covid-19 response, drawing together experiences and lessons learned in time for the next crisis. Liza is now based at CU Boulder/Cambridge but is still part of the Epiforecasts team.

Luke Burton

Luke is an MPhil/PhD student exploring behavioural drivers of epidemic dynamics. He is currently investigating how behavioural indicators predict changes in transmission, including frameworks to leverage such data.

Sam Abbott

Sam’s main interests are developing, evaluating, and applying methods for improving our understanding of infectious disease dynamics in real-time. See his personal website for more detail on his current research and interests.

Toshiaki Asakura

Toshiaki is a PhD student working on household study data and is interested in applying modelling techniques to support decision-making, particularly in the context of real-time response. He has also an interest in in combining various sources of data (such as genome data) for better insights.

Former team members

Akira Endo · Alexis Robert · Ciara McCarthy · Friederike Becker · Hannah Choi · Hugo Gruson · James M. Azam · James Munday · Jinyu Li · Joel Hellewell · Joseph Palmer · Manuel Stapper · Nikos Bosse · Robin Thompson · Sophie Meakin · William Green

Timeline